Timo Houben

Ph.D. Student

Department Computational Hydrosystems (CHS)
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ
Permoserstraße 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany

Contact

Building 7.1, Room 408
Phone: +49 341 235 482303
timo.houben@ufz.de

Research interests

spectral analysis of baseflow and groundwater head fluctuations to obtain effective regional aquifer parameters (T, S and tc)
numerical groundwater modelling
high performance computing
goal oriented modelling and complexity assessment
travel time analysis in deeper groundwater systems
machine learning

Education

since August 2017

Ph.D. student, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

April 2013 - Feb. 2016

Master of Science - Applied Geosciences
Engineering Geology, Hydrogeology and Geophysics
RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Okt. 2009 - Feb. 2013

Bachelor of Science - Applied Geosciences
RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Index:

2023 (1)
2022 (1)

You could use our publication index for further requests.

2023 (1)

Pujades, E., Kumar, R., Houben, T., Jing, M., Rakovec, O.R., Kalbacher, T., Attinger, S. (2023):
Towards the construction of representative regional hydro(geo)logical numerical models: Modelling the Upper Danube basin as a starting point
Front. Earth Sci. 11 , art. 1061420
full text (doi)

to index

2022 (1)

Houben, T., Pujades, E., Kalbacher, T., Dietrich, P., Attinger, S. (2022):
From dynamic groundwater level measurements to regional aquifer parameters – Assessing the power of spectral analysis
Water Resour. Res. 58 (5), e2021WR031289
full text (doi)

to index

Previous Publications

Klitzsch, N., Houben, T., Brunner, M., Kleinow, R., 2014: Geophysical prospection of siderite concretions in sediments – a feasibility study. Applied Geophysics and Geothermal Energy, E.ON Energy Research Center, RWTH Aachen University

Talks

Spektralanalyse von Grundwasserganglinien zur Ermittlung von hydrogeologischen Parametern. Houben, T., March 2023, Digital Water Institute - Impuls.
Using machine learning to spatially estimate soil moisture in an agricultural field., Boog, J., Ebeling, P., Houben, T., Khurana, S., Schmid, J., Schmidt, L.. 5th Data Science Symposium, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel, GEOMAR
From dynamic groundwater head measurements to regional aquifer parameters., Houben, T., Kalbacher, T., Pujades, E., Dietrich, P., Attinger, S.. December 2019. AGU Fall Meeting 2019. San Francisco. Presentation (9.8 MB)
When does model complexity pay off? A case study for groundwater modelling., Houben, T., de Rooij, G., Attinger, S., Kalbacher, T., Dietrich, P., October 2018. TERENO International Conference 2018. Berlin.

Posters

Modelling Groundwater Travel Time Distributions in the Hainich CZE. Timo Houben, Tino Rödiger, Sabine Attinger and Falk Hesse. 28th FH-DGGV Conference, March 2022, Jena. FH-DGGV_22_TTD
Estimating hydraulic response times of aquifers in southern Germany. Timo Houben, Mariaines Di Dato, Rohini Kumar, Sabine Attinger, iPoster AGU_21_SpA at AGU Fall Meeting 2021.
Machine learning based spatio-temporal interpolation of soil moisture in an agricultural catchment. Swamini Khurana, Timo Houben, Pia Ebeling, Julia Schmid, Lennart Schmidt, Mohit Anand, Johannes Boog, iPoster AGU_21_ML at AGU Fall Meeting 2021.
Inferring regional aquifer parameters by spectral analysis of groundwater head fluctuations - A feasibility study. Timo Houben, Estanislao Pujades, Mariaines Di Dato, Rohini Kumar, Sabine Attinger. iPoster AGU_20 at AGU Fall Meting 2020. Online Conference.
Regional aquifer parameters by spectral analysis of groundwater head fluctuations – a synthetic study. Houben, T., Kalbacher, T., Dietrich and S. Attinger. EGU General Assembly 2019. Vienna. EGU_19 (5.4 MB)

Internal Activities

Machine Learning Café. Chair: Timo Houben, Co-Chair: Lennart Schmidt, Swamini Khurana. You are new to machine learning and need an overview? Or you just want to talk about your challenges in your studies in an informal setting? Grab a coffee and visit us in Building 7.1, room 301 on Thursdays from 4:30 p.m. Be up to date and have a look at our GitLab-Repo. Looking forward to study with you!
PhD-Team Data Science. Chair: Swamini Khurana, Co-Chair: Timo Houben. You are doing your PhD at UFZ and are interested in data science? Come and join us! Further info right here.

Teaching

Geoecological Field Course, 2019, University of Potsdam

Hydrochemistry: Theory and regional setting of groundwater and surface water bodies in the vicinity of the research station in Gülpe, groundwater and surface water sampling, evaluation of chemical analysis of water samples
Climatology: Theory of terrain climatology with focus on the Havel meadow as well as measurement systems at the climate stations, manual measurement of climatic parameters, data visualization and analysis

Contact

Head
Prof. Dr. Sabine Attinger
Department of Computational Hydrosystems
tbl-modmon@ufz.de

Deputy Head
Prof. Dr. Luis Samaniego
Department of Computational Hydrosystems
luis.samaniego@ufz.de

Assistance
Nora Pabst
Phone +49 341 235-1281

Sindy Bleiholder
Phone +49 341 235-1250

Susanne Kühn
Phone +49 341 235-482533

sekces@ufz.de

Permoserstraße 15 | 04318 Leipzig

News / Press

May 16, 2023

Start of ESA funded project 4DHydro

The overarching objective of 4DHydro is to foster collaborations between the Earth Observation (EO) water cycle community developing novel high-resolution EO data products, and the land surface and hydrological modelling community (LSM/HM) engaged in advancing hyperresolution modelling of the hydrological cycle at regional and continental scales. By involving several European institutions 4DHydro will assess and improve data sets of EO as well as synchronize EO products and LSM/HM models in order to improve predictions of the hydrological system. Overall, it will assist end-users and decisions-makers as well as the EU Destination Earth initiative. The project’s kick-off meeting will take place in Leipzig on 21st of June 2023.

Jan 30, 2023

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The following paper received the ASCE-EWRI 2023 Award for Best Case Study in the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering.

Mai, J. , B. A. Tolson, H. Shen, É. Gaborit, V. Fortin, N. Gasset, H. Awoye, T. A. Stadnyk, L. M. Fry, E. A. Bradley, F. Seglenieks, A. G. Temgoua, D. G. Princz, S. Gharari, A. Haghnegahdar, M. E. Elshamy, S. Razavi, M. Gauch, J. Lin, X. Ni, Y. Yuan, M. McLeod, N. B. Basu, R. Kumar, O. Rakovec, L. Samaniego, S. Attinger, N. K. Shrestha, P. Daggupati, T. Roy, S. Wi, T. Hunter, J. R. Craig, and A. Pietroniro (2021):
The Great Lakes Runoff Intercomparison Project Phase 3: Lake Erie (GRIP-E)
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 26(9), 05021020. Accepted Feb 16, 2021.

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29HE.1943-5584.0002097

Dec 1, 2022

Award Poster Masooma Batool

Masooma Batool won the "Best student poster award" at the XXI International Nitrogen Workshop.
This conference, hosted by ETSIAAB, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, brought together nearly 300 papers from authors from 40 countries in Madrid, Spain, October 24-28, 2022.
At the conference, Masooma and her colleagues presented long-term trends in soil nitrogen (N) surplus across Europe (1850-2019). Excess N provides information on the trends and spatial distribution of N surplus in soil systems across Europe, highlighting agricultural areas in Central Europe as nitrogen hotspots. These areas have undergone dramatic changes over the past 150 years. Importantly, we show that estimates of N surplus are subject to large uncertainties, requiring explicit consideration of these uncertainties when analyzing past trends in N surplus.

Nov 15, 2022

Earthrise - Mission Klima
How our research contributes to climate mitigation and adaptation is demonstrated in this WELT report.

Video at www.welt.de (only in German)

05:50': Hohes Holz research station
10:40': FORMIND in the Vislab
15:45': Fragmentation of forests
43:00': FORMIND and climate scenarios

Oct 12, 2022

Dr. Husain Najafi won the UFZ Young Scientist Award for Applied Research 2022. The award goes to him for his excellence and dedication in development of the operational drought forecasting system in Germany and investigation of 2021 summer flood predictability. Hydrological forecasting systems are the fundamental component of early warning systems - disaster risk reduction.

Older news are stored in the news archive.

New publications

Friedrich Boeing, Oldrich Rakovec, Rohini Kumar, Luis Samaniego, Martin Schrön, Anke Hildebrandt, Corinna Rebmann, Stephan Thober, Sebastian Müller, Steffen Zacharias, Heye Bogena, Katrin Schneider, Ralf Kiese, Sabine Attinger, and Andreas Marx. High-resolution drought simulations and comparison to soil moisture observations in Germany. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 5137–5161, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-5137-2022

In this paper, we deliver an evaluation of the second generation operational German drought monitor ( https://www.ufz.de/duerremonitor ) with a state-of-the-art compilation of observed soil moisture data from 40 locations and four different measurement methods in Germany. We show that the expressed stakeholder needs for higher resolution drought information at the one-kilometer scale can be met and that the agreement of simulated and observed soil moisture dynamics can be moderately improved.
Mahnken, M., Cailleret, M., Collalti, A., Trotta, C., Biondo, C., D’Andrea, E., ... & Reyer, C. P. O. (2022). Accuracy, realism and general applicability of European forest models. Global Change Biology. DOI: 10.1111/gcb.16384
Pacheco-Labrador, J., Weber, U., Ma, X., Mahecha, M. D., Carvalhais, N., Wirth, C., Huth, A., Bohn, F. J., Kraemer, G., Heiden, U., FunDivEUROPE members, and Migliavacca, M.: EVALUATING THE POTENTIAL OF DESIS TO INFER PLANT TAXONOMICAL AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITIES IN EUROPEAN FORESTS, Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., XLVI-1/W1-2021, 49–55, 2022. DOI: 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVI-1-W1-2021-49-2022
Bevacqua, E., De Michele, C., Manning, C., Couasnon, A., Ribeiro, A.F.S., Ramos, A.M., Vignotto, E., Bastos, A., Blesić, S., Durante, F., Hillier, J., Oliveira, S.C., Pinto, J.G., Ragno, E., Rivoire, P., Saunders, K., van der Wiel, K., Wu, W., Zhang, T., Zscheischler, J. (2021): Guidelines for Studying Diverse Types of Compound Weather and Climate Events. Earth Future. 10.1029/2021EF002340
Najafi H, Robertson AW, Massah Bavani AR, Irannejad P, Wanders N, Wood EF. Improved multi-model ensemble forecasts of Iran's precipitation and temperature using a hybrid dynamical-statistical approach during fall and winter seasons. Int
J Climatol. 2021;1–28. DOI: 10.1002/joc.7148

Hari, V., Rakovec, O., Markonis, Y. et al. Increased future occurrences of the exceptional 2018–2019 Central European drought under global warming. Sci Rep 10, 12207 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-68872-9

Schmidt, L., Heße, F., Attinger, S., Kumar, R., (2020): "Challenges in applying machine learning models for hydrological inference: A case study for flooding events across Germany", Water Resources Research DOI: 10.1029/2019WR025924

Jing, M., Kumar, R., Heße, F., Thober, S., Rakovec, O., Samaniego, L., Attinger, S., (2020): "Assessing the response of groundwater quantity and travel time distribution to 1.5, 2, and 3 °C global warming in a mesoscale central German basin", Hydrology and Earth System Sciences DOI: 10.5194/hess-24-1511-2020

Sep 2, 2022

The collaborative project "Standardisiertes Monitoring von Wachstumsreaktionen wichtiger Waldbaumarten auf klimatische Extremereignisse" (MW³) with participation of the UFZ will develop a standardized monitoring system and protocol to record growth responses of important Central European forest tree species with a focus on climatic extremes. Future extreme events and their impact on forest carbon fluxes in Germany will be analyzed using smart models.